SXSW Interactive is well known for being a five-day hothouse for trends, and this year – despite a slightly more sober atmosphere – was no exception. The unofficial theme could have been real-time, from search to conference coverage and socialising. Festival buzz was amplified on big screens through the centre, which scraped SXSWi-related posts from Twitter and folksonomised conversations and party gossip. As in previous years, corridors were still lined with geeks and their laptops, but there was noticeably less lengthy blogging and more time spent on netbooks and phones issuing pithy tweets during sessions. And consequently the convention centre's wireless was flawless all festival, while iPhone users had brought AT&T's mobile network to its knees by the first day.

The British contingent was bigger than ever, with more than 35 digital startups promoting themselves on a UK Trade & Investment trip. The Swiss startup Poken was attracting attention: the plastic RFID characters are right at home at a geek conference, where they let owners swap contact details without the need for those old-fashioned business cards, though the product is very rough around the edges.

Fish for friends

And Facebook's traditional SXSWi appearance unveiled Facebook Connect for the iPhone, along with a slew of popular launch partners. Another footnote in the social networking site's strategy of developer-friendly expansion, the launch means developers can design games that exploit the iPhone's location, combined with allowing users to play against other Facebook friends online.

SGN's Agency Wars will appeal to a traditional gaming audience interested in placing real-world clues and tagging those locations, but for its fellow launch partner Playfish, which produces three of the top 10 Facebook games, location is still too niche. The goal is to appeal to a far more mainstream casual gaming audience – and it has an eye on Facebook's 175 million users. The Playfish strategy is that there is far more incentive for users to compete with people they know than with strangers – so expect to be pestered by Facebook friends soon, asking you to find out "who has the biggest brain?".

Predictably, location-based services were a major feature this year, with launches that included Foursquare, a social, location-based game by the Dodgeball creator, Dennis Crowley, and a new Facebook application for the location management tool Fire Eagle. While early adopters such as the SXSWers have been exploring location-based services for some time, it is inevitable that more consumer and privacy-friendly versions will start to creep into the mainstream.

Tom Coates, who heads up the Fire Eagle project for Yahoo, said there had been a gradual but perceptible shift in the information that the public feel comfortable publishing online. Previously, people were told not to put anything online that could identify them – their name, job or contact information. Now many web users have detailed profiles on social networking sites that often share intimate information.

"People do have some very reasonable anxieties, but they also have some very irrational ones," says Coates. "We have to give them a range of settings that give them control over their location, but also explain and reassure them."

Fire Eagle users can update their location once and set up multiple applications to use that information in different ways. There are already 70 applications that plug into Fire Eagle, including one that shows local jobs, one that updates your location from your BlackBerry and now Friends on Fire for Facebook, which shows you and your friends' location on a map.

The new Facebook application exploits another huge area of discussion at SXSWi – plugging services into a users' social network. Coates says he visualises several core data-sets at the centre of developing technologies: the first of these was social networks and the second is location. "Some will argue that people are very pliable, and that technology manipulates them, but that's not the way I understand the world. I believe there is an under­lying human nature that is not optimised or expressed, and that technology can give them tools to extend their abilities."

Social relationships are just one set of data that has become core to many services online, but location could similarly transform "virtually every service"; from displaying emails sent by people in your own office to Flickr photos from your home town. Coates describes Flickr as "a microcosm of the internet" because of the multiple axes to navigate the more than 3bn photos on the site.

Lighting the way

While many social networks are competing on complex features, Coates says the rise of Twitter demonstrates the value of paring services down to their simplest functionality. The popularity of smartphones is pushing that trend, demanding simplified versions of services.

The web – whether mobile or desk-based – will continue to evolve as "the best and most powerful interface" for managing all the information in our lives, from professional and social relationships to the data consumption of our homes, and even new tools that track our blood pressure or heart rate. Real-time updates and location services will be accepted as essential, switching the lights on in your house just before you walk up the front path, for example, or sending you an alert if your front door is opened while you're out.